Comments on: huge and important news: free licenses upheld

By: georgea78

georgea78 — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 12:43:27 +0000

I am very proud to report today that the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (THE "IP" court in the US) has upheld a free (ok, they call them "open source") copyright license, explicitly pointing to the work of Creative Commons and others. (The specific license at issue was the Artistic License.) This is a very important victory, and I am very very happy that the Stanford Center for Internet and Society played a key role in securing it.
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georgea

http://lessig.org/blog/2008/08/huge_and_important_news_free_l.html

By: Affordable Essay

Affordable Essay — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 13:37:07 +0000

The software maker would need to prove that it had suffered damage by your breach of the contract and it would receive reasonable damages - in this case, the cost of "renewing" the use of the software for the time you had used it in breach of the contract.Affordable Essay

By: ann321

ann321 — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 08:35:56 +0000

Stanford's Center for Internet and Society brought their student blogs on line just before Thanksgiving last year. They are still growing and have not yet become as regularly published as the blogs at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. It is encouraging to see so many sites for people to discuss law coming to the net. There are those at schools, and sites like Groklaw.
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Ann

SEO

By: Design

Design — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 15:38:20 +0000

If I undestand correctly, this should really have a great impact on a lot of other "free-software" law suits.
Thanks for the information. And congratulations from my side, too.

By: IPEB Law Blog

IPEB Law Blog — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 12:48:59 +0000

It's like the civil rights movement. One step at a time. Creative Commons and the ACLU.

By: movablemike

movablemike — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 02:45:35 +0000

I would like to echo a point raised earlier: Do we have any sense of how persuasive this decision may be in other federal courts? (The Federal Circuit only adjudicates disputes concerning patents -- not copyrights.) Thank you,
-Mike

By: sfphollywood

sfphollywood — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 09:34:37 +0000

Here's a link to a two-minute video by a lawyer who agrees with the court of appeals:

http://jurisvodcast.com/2008/08/17/open-source-copyright-infringement/

By: Peter Brink

Peter Brink — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 21:12:34 +0000

@andrew garton
For Civil Law jurisdictions it's of little value. Common Law case law is at best used as inspiration by legal scientists but have near to zero value in court. Cases about the validity of the GPL has been settled in European courts, both in Germany and the Netherlands, proving that the GPL is a valid contract. Whether a Civil Law court will agree to that even a minor breach of contract (such as failure to attribute) will have the effect of termination of the rights to use the work and that breach of the terms = copyright infringement, remains to be seen.

By: Bryan Pfaffenberger

Bryan Pfaffenberger — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 06:50:34 +0000

A properly conceived open source license restricts its downstream manipulation only with respect to the exclusive rights of the copyright holder (namely, to copy, distribute, modify, or perform a work publicly), so I see nothing pernicious in this ruling. There is, it seems, much to celebrate. The district court's decision, I believe, reflected an ideological bias that says, in effect, that if you give something away, it isn't worth anything. There is overwhelming evidence that collaborative open source endeavors are capable of creating wealth. (Consider, for example, science.) In this decision, the CAFC declares its acceptance of this principle.

What intrigues me is how the patent infringement aspect fits in. The decision notes that its jurisdiction is related to the inclusion in the case of a patent infringement allegation. Since this appeal concerned the preliminary injunction, and not the substance of the case, it isn't surprising that this matter doesn't come up again in the CAFC's decision. Still, it will presumably play out now that the case has been remanded.

I don't know the details, but it's my impression, based on allegations I've read in model railroading blogs and forums, that Kam not only violated the terms of the Artistic License in its appropriation of the plaintiff's technology, but also obtained a patent that, if its validity were sustained, would exclude the plaintiff from making, using, or selling this technology. In other words, it seems to me that there is a possibility of a very interesting collision between copyright and patent law in this case, which is far from over.

-B. Pfaffenberger, Science, Technology, and Society, UVa

By: Robert Horning

Robert Horning — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 05:21:53 +0000

The MySQL situation noted by Simon Hibbs above isn't quite correct.

You can use MySQL in a business setting. What you can't do is sell or redistribute software that accesses the MySQL databases using the API libraries unless that software is:

1) Also licensed under the GPL

2) You have obtained a separate commercial license for using MySQL

In other words, the software is dual-licensed, and you can select which license you want to use: the proprietary license or the GPL.

Frankly I think MySQL A.B. is out to lunch with this interpretation of the GPL, but it is a very fine point of the whole philosophy of open source software, and they are trying to earn money from the sales of their commercial licenses by using the GPL version of their software as a teaser. On the positive side, even the commercial license is quite cheap compared to other database licenses, and on a practical side you only have to pay for each server that uses the database and not each client. As a developer you also have some excellent support if you are using licensed copies of the database.

So you can run a commercial business with MySQL software "for free", but it is somewhat limited. MySQL's interpretation of this is irrelevant with this ruling, as it would have to dive into the fine points of what exactly the GPL says you can and can't do with the software.

On the whole, this is a huge ruling, and it is a positive step forward for all free content licenses.